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Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Eastern Region Public Media's Executive Director, Georgette Bronfman, was (if you'll excuse the expression) flashing around Aluratek's tiny "internet radio" in a thumb drive at the NPR board meeting last week. I had to get one, of course, so ordered it from Amazon. Turns out there's no radio at all in it. It's just a small flash drive containing exe and autorun files that you plug into your computer's USB port while your computer is connected to the internet. The exe file accesses a database of station streaming feeds (public radio is one category) and seems to access them pretty quickly when in use. Visuals include a pretty light on the thumb drive and ads for other Aluratek products (including a real internet radio) on the control panel. There are many other options for accessing public radio streams, including the excellent and free publicradiofan.com, but if you'd like an easy access point providing a large number of commercial radio streams, it's probably worth the $33 + shipping.

It would be a simple programming task for someone to make an exe dedicated to your stations feeds and archives and, of course, adding a link to npr.org. Put it in a small commodity thumb drive and you have a pretty nifty premium.

Not all public radio stations are in the database and those that are may not be described the way you want yours branded. This is a good reminder that we need to find a way to stay on top of listings in the increasing array of databases such as this one and the one on Nokia FM-capable phones that I use regularly. --Dennis

Our new SVP & GM Digital Media at NPR, Kinsey Wilson, sent around the following email to a few of us this morning. With permission and thanks, I'm sharing it with you. --Dennis

As you dig into
the morning papers, I'd call to your attention an
interesting article in the NY Times today that describes how small, independent,
not-for-profit local news web sites are springing up around the country --
further evidence of the growing number of players that hope to lay claim to the
local news franchise as papers come under increased financial pressure.

This line in particular caught my attention: "[F]financially, VoiceofSan
Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are
nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience
contributions and a little advertising."

If they succeed, they could gradually compete for the audience, allegiance and
charitable giving that traditionally has sustained public radio. The audience
for terrestrial public radio isn't likely to go away anytime soon. But as
younger audiences form their media habits and older audiences look for serious
local news sources to replace the papers they once relied upon -- something
that's happening right now -- sites like these will gain in influence and
popularity among our target audience and could eventually pose a threat to the
member station franchise.

Local public
radio stations are ideally positioned to form alliances with sites
like these. The member stations have reach; they have an audience already
pre-disposed to quality journalism; and if they want to use it to this end, the
ability to drive traffic to these (or co-branded?) endeavors. They
also have established relationships with funders, which these sites
presumably are just starting to put together. The startup-ups, meanwhile, have
the capacity to innovate in ways most stations do not.

In other
words, member stations could potentially bring audience and money to the
table to help keep these efforts alive; and in the process further
develop their reputation and capacity as a source of serious local news.
(And NPR, through its API, could provide wider visibility and lift for these
efforts).

If half a
dozen of the more progressive member stations around the country aligned with the
best of these sites on a trial basis, they might create a model that other
start-ups and stations could emulate.

In addition
to the sites mentioned in Richard Pérez-Peña 's piece, also check out the newly
launched Spot.US, which solicits
story pitches from individual journalists in the Bay area and asks readers to
donate money to support story ideas they think are worthy of further effort. It
launched Monday.

Monday, 17 November 2008

I got the following post from my son Andrew (a designer in Providence, RI) on Twitter this morning:

ahaar Just got app for streaming music from home computer to iPhone. Device storage = irrelevant, future = now

That home computer, though, still needs space for music, photos and video. I just bought an iMac yesterday, mostly for photo editing, and it has a half terabyte drive. I see that the drive in the latest TiVo is a full TB. In March 2006 I wrote here that the then 100-GB TiVo hard drive would be 1.6 TB in five ticks of Moore's Law (1 tick = 18 months). Wrong -- it took only 32 months to get to 1 TB. Big home storage seems to be a settled thing, but increasingly it looks to me like Andrew is right about the diminished need for mobile storage as long as 3G mobile networks are available. --Dennis

Thursday, 13 November 2008

There has been an email conversation within the public radio community about whether or not to increase the power of the digital ("HD Radio") service of those radio stations which provide both analog and digital services. Unlike digital television, which completely replaces analog television next February and for which digital operates on a completely different channel, digital radio operates on the same channel, magically intertwining with the analog signal. It's not likely that analog radio will go away any time soon, or perhaps ever.

So the fact that these two technologies have to co-exist has led those who set conditions for such things to provide for a very low power level for the digital component. But that has caused HD Radio coverage to be, in many cases, less than for the analog part of the signal. In public radio, some stations, such as the ones I managed out in the Northwest, take advantage of nearby mountaintops for transmitter sites, but that often means they're not as closely located to the metropolitan population center as is desirable in a low-power digital situation.

The FCC has been looking into this and is considering permitting stations to increase the digital power level. NPR has conducted tests on this and it has revealed some concerns. The Executive Director of NPR Labs, Mike Starling, takes over from here in a note he posted yesterday to the public radio system:

Regarding the recent messages about HD Radio coverage and the proposed power increases, our studies show we need to balance the need for digital coverage improvement against potential interference to your analog signals.

While improving HD Radio indoor coverage is essential, NPR supports a managed power increase, on a voluntary basis, where needed. We do not support iBiquity’s unconditional, proposed 10 dB power increase at the minority of stations where our studies predict interference can occur to more than 20% of the listeners INSIDE of the protected 60 dBu contour of neighboring first-adjacent stations.

Please join us next week for an interconnect to go over this issue and why we feel so strongly that a managed increase is necessary. We’ll be providing audio samples of the interference we found in our study -- so you can actually hear the interference effects for yourself.

[Here, I take out the interconnect info, but if you're in public radio, please check for the details with your A-Rep and join the discussion. --Dennis]

The FCC has put both the NPR Labs DRCIA report and the “Joint Parties” filings out for public comment, with a comment deadline of November 28 (yes, the day after Thanksgiving). We are eager to hear from you so that your views will inform our comments in this proceeding - and to hopefully achieve a common public radio position on this filing.

While adjacent channel IBOC interference does not obliterate the signal or fundamentally alter basic intelligibility, it increases the noise level of reception, which is most noticeable on voice programs such as news and public affairs. In our report, a consumer listener panel determined our protection criteria for the FM signal at not less than “good” audio quality. While it is still a listenable signal for committed listeners, it is audibly noisier than interference at the present 1% IBOC power. And outside your protected coverage area (which the FCC has recently reminded us they do not protect against such effects) it would be worse. We are especially concerned in situations where adjacent channel spacing is insufficient in our view to support a full 10dB power increase among spectrum neighbors (which could include your station!).

Even in close-spaced instances, we believe alternative solutions such as unequal sideband power, directional IBOC antennas, and single frequency network boosters can provide the needed improvement in indoor signals without generating the interference levels that listeners judge as degraded signals. To our favor, iBiquity announced at the September NAB Radio conference that they will fully support the development and deployment of these recommended alternative strategies.

Just as our DTV colleagues faced significant challenges a few years back with the need for increased power, we hope this chapter in HD’s rollout will be chronicled under “early lessons learned” about the robustness and indoor penetration limits of digital signals.

Hopefully, this too will turn out to have been an important, but ultimately successful turn of events to optimize the digital deployment for the future. We look forward to hearing from you during the interconnect.

Wednesday, 12 November 2008

Yesterday, NPR announced that Vivian Schiller, current SVP/GM at NYTimes.com, will become its new President and CEO effective January 5th. She brings some great qualifications with her, not the least of which to readers of this blog is her history of bringing content out from behind DRM at the Times. In previous professional lives, Vivian also has experience with long form media at CNN and Discovery. I'm very happy to extend to her my enthusiastic support.

I will continue as NPR's Interim Prez/CEO until then, and the board has asked me to follow that with a stint as Executive Vice President. Thanks to the many well-wishers who've written or called since yesterday. It's been a true privilege to serve in this role. There is no "NPR exception" from the current deep recession, but I'm confident we will be unwaivering in our commitment to both excellent journalism and breaking new ground in emerging platforms.

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

I'm very proud of NPR's Open API effort, a sample of which you can see on the left column of this blog. I believe it will prove to be the single most important web distribution initiative in public media. One of the architects of this effort, Daniel Jacobson, writes about this in a post at NPR.org, which also has a link to a pdf of his recent presentation on the topic at the recent Business of APIs Conference. Link: NPR.org. For links to other information on the API, click here. --Dennis